The Ecology of Union

I live in Pownal, and if I am driving back to the Abbey from Bennington, I always come home via Cedar Hill Road, a well-maintained dirt road that leads to 346. It’s the kind of road I always dreamed of driving down on my way home. In the summer there is a long green tree tunnel of mostly maples that turns gold and burnt orange in the fall. My wife and I have the practice of holding silence as we drive through the tunnel. We hold our words to better hold the beauty that we have been given in that moment. The mountains rise as you crest a hill and the splendor of the shire leaves me awe struck. Further along the road is the grove of American Sycamore trees, or as I think of them, the bone forest. At any given point on Cedar Hill, you may encounter neighbors in the form of hares, bobcat, deer, turkeys, and the occasional bear. If I walk the road at the right time of day and proceed up Quarry Hill, the Gardner’s cattle follow me along the fence line expecting to be fed. These are beautiful well cared for cows that will feed our community, and my encounters with them are ones of gratitude – we are part of a living food system here, an ecology of relationships that runs bone to bone. The cattle are fed by the earth, I eat the cattle, and thus I consume the land. It is most surely a holy communion, an eucharist of earth.

We are told in Genesis that in the beginning the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Do we think that God has stopped – stopped moving upon the face of the waters, stopped moving upon the hills and mountains of the earth, stopped moving through the tree tunnels, and through the sugar sap of those trees? When would God have ever stopped moving upon us all. We were given to the land and gifted an ecology of Union.

To understand ecology is to understand relationships, it is to trace the humming electric pulse of God kissed life energy through all of its different forms. And for me as a religious person (from the Latin religio – to reconnect), it is to see and accept that it is all made in the image of God.

Renee Good was created in the image in God. Jonathan Ross – the ICE agent who shot Renee Good and ended her life – is also created in the image of God. On January 7, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the image of God was profaned. But that image was not profaned on Renee Good’s flesh and bones by bullets – any more than the image of God was profaned through the crucifixion of Jesus’ body by the state. The image of God was profaned by the firing of the gun in Jonathan Ross’ hand. The image is profaned on the agent of the state, not the victim. This matters in understanding the depth of the moral break here. We defile the image of God when we use the gift of that image to murder, to destroy families, to cage, to assault children, to create an environment of fear; and such desecration is more than immoral it is a sin.

The pollution of the human mind with hate and indifference is creating a culture of death where all are expendable at the will of authority. This culture of death is further reflected in the pollution of our waters, of our air, of our earth – it is an attempt to corrupt what is sacred. The image of God transcends all nationalism and roots itself in universal connection, and to see the connection is perhaps our most important form of resistance in this moment. The spirit of God is still moving upon the waters, still moving upon us, still creating and recreating us in God’s image. We are invited to dangerous memory, to remember who we are. Resist the destruction of the image of God and be not afraid.

Originally published in the Bennington Banner